Among them, the first two functions are often mixed up in SM language. For most people, the informative function is predominantly the major role of language. Language is the instrument of thought and people often feel the need to speak their thoughts aloud as when they are working on a math problem. And the most important sociological use of language is the interpersonal function, by
which people establish and maintain a comfortable relation in a society. SM is a medium whose function is rather confusing. People use it to convey information, keep in touch with each other, share jokes, express emotions or even pass anger. But the recipient cannot tell which from which, he might deal with his short messages with an attitude that is unexpected by its sender. Let’s see the following example.
A: “I played football this afternoon, how tired I am.”
B: “Oh, really? You’re energetic!”
The conversation ends here. A feels tired after playing football, and sends a SM to one of his friends B to express his excitement. But this confuses B as to how to respond appropriately, or he may simply brood about it for quite a long time.
Secondly, the recipients of SM make their own interpretations based on situational effects and schemata. The first and the second sort of misunderstandings can be somewhat overlapping. Because function of SM language is not clear, people began to interpret messages with their own experience. Besides, the quantity of information conveyed is often inadequate, SM leaves a lot of blank spaces in what people say, which the recipient tends to fill with the most negative interpretations.
Thirdly, how to end SM conversation and
when is the right time to end it also bother SM users a lot. No matter how people enjoy SM, writing it is very time consuming. If one wants to end it and the other does not, at least one will be unpleasant. It is unlikely that both of them are ready for SM conversation at the same time, because two people are in two environments.
III The deficiency of SM in contrast with face-to-face conversation and Tel call
People can hide themselves behind the tiny screens, and therefore, they are braver and they can tell whatever they like. So many people are now abusing it. But is it superior to face-to-face conversations and telephone calls? The answer might be no.
Firstly, SM lacks body language and facial expressions. The communicative use of the visual and tactile modes is often referred to as “nonverbal communication”, especially in academic discussion. In everyday terms, it is the area of “body language” (Crystal 1997: 403). Most people may not be aware of the importance of it when they message each other, because they do it subconsciously. The field of non-verbal visual communication, kinesics, can be broken down into several components: facial expression, eye contact, gesture, and body posture. Each component performs a variety of functions. Movements of the face and body can give clues to a person’s personality and emotional state. The face, in particular, signals a wide range of emotions, such as fear, happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, interest, and disgust. Many of the expressions vary in meaning from culture to culture. In addition, the face and body send signals about the way a social interaction is proceeding. Patterns of eye contact show who is talking to whom; facial expression provides feed-back to the speaker, expressing such meanings as puzzlement or disbelief; and a body posture conveys a person’s attitude towards the interaction (e.g. relaxation, interest, boredom).
Several kinds of social context are associated with specific facial or body behaviors (e.g. waving while taking leave.) Ritual or official occasions are often primarily marked by such factors as kneeling, or blessing. While SM only provides its recipient scores of characters (one short massage contains no more than 70 Chinese characters), the sender’s facial expression or even his attitude towards what he said only depends on the recipient’s personal imagination. The real meaning of SM and intention thus are often misunderstood.
Besides, compared with traditional conversation, SM lacks proper stress and intonation. Stress refers to the degree of force used in producing a syllable. In transcription, a raised vertical like [ ′] is used just before the syllable it relates to. A basic distinction is made between stressed and unstressed syllables, the former being more prominent than the latter usually due to an increase in loudness, length or pitch. This means that stress is a relative notion. (Hu 2001:71) At the word level, it only applies to words with at least two syllables. Stress pattern in Chinese is easier, because we can just focus on sentence level, where a monosyllabic word may be said to be stressed relative to other words in the sentence. Sentence stress is often used to express emphasis, surprise, etc, so that in principle stress may fall on any word or any syllable. For example, a SM conversation begins with a sentence like this, “I went shopping around Jiefangbei the whole day. I bought nothing.”
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